Thoughts on Lost, Season 2

After watching much Lost in the weekend, here's what I can conclude:

- The Others are the new Hatch.
- The writers are really taking some risks with the status quo and audience sympathy.
- The big thing that the show will probably be trying to do in the next season is start reconciling the mystical elements of the Island with the rational explanations that are developing.

Filed in: tv lost review

New Futurama!

Looks like it's happening, folks. According to AICN, who quote Billy ('Fry') West, they're "hammering out the deal now."

Filed in: tv sf

Did you know ...?

we have a government department to defend New Zealand against cyber-attacks?
The CCIP.
They are my new heroes.

Aeon Flux

It isn't a version of the cartoon - Aeon Flux the movie doesn't capture its unique mood or sense of movement at all.

There is lots of great colour and nifty details, and one interesting idea that leads to a heartfelt moment. But the storytelling is lacking - quite often the script leaves the audience adrift as to exactly what they're supposed to be caring about.

I've listened to the director, Karyn Kusama (Girlfight) at a panel. Extremely intelligent, very capable. I think she did as well with this Hollywood version of Aeon Flux and I can't wait for her next project.



Cool sidenote: Stuart Dryburgh, the Kiwi who shot In My Father's Den, was the DOP.

Filed in: film script

The Wicker Man

Writing Gilmore Girls

Jane Espenson discusses the 'lifelike rhythms' of Gilmore Girls episodes at her blog.

She talks about how the big events that would be the Act Breaks of other TV shows seem to fall randomly, sometimes halfway between two commercial breaks:

Stories unfold along curly lines, they sometimes end long before the end of the episode, with other stories starting late; they involve long, long scenes with long speeches and long exchanges that don't further the story, and sometimes with important action happening off screen. All of these things break rules.

We're approaching the start of Season 5 on the TV2 5.30pm repeats.

Filed in: script tv

Nude Oscar Actresses

James Berardinelli analyses how many Oscar nominated actresses have done nude scenes during their careers, so you don't have to. His conclusions so far:

over the last three years, here are the totals. In the Lead Actress category, 12 out of 15 nominees have done nudity during their careers (80%). All three winners have done career nudity. (Since 2006 was a sweep, it doesn't matter who the winner is.) But only 5 out of 15 (33%) did a nude scene as part of the nominated performance. In the Supporting actress category, 10 out of 15 nominees have done career nudity (67%). One of three winners has done career nudity (33%). And 5 out of 15 (33%) did a nude scene as part of the nominated performance.

Filed in: film

Adaptation

(scr. Charles & Donald Kaufmann, dir. Spike Jonze)

"Adaptation's a profound process. Figure out how to thrive in this world."

Just rewatching one of my favourite movies. What's this, the fifth time? And I'm beginning to understand the overall conflict of the film. It's the struggle between what we are and what we want to be. The struggle to adapt to the world as it is.

How is this illustrated? Almost every scene in the A-plot (Charlie vs. himself) is Charlie constantly self-sabotaging his ideal life. Examples: "I could write this scene" vs. "I could have another muffin"; "I could stay out with Amelia & kiss her" vs. "I have to go home and brood about the script."

It's the conflict between just one person and the implication of what his life could be. And I think this interpretation's supported by having Donald as the counter-point to Charlie, effortlessly achieving everything Charlie can't.

Susan Orlean represents one part of Charlie's ideal life - the effortless writer. But she too desires an ideal life that her repression prevents her from achieving; she "longs to feel passionate about something" and so she too is in conflict with herself. John Laroche is her counterpoint- a man who knows how to adapt, dropping passions when they're no longer useful & picking up new ones.

Characters in conflict with something that's almost entirely implied via subtext. I like it.

Filed in: movie review script

Failed Dates (No. 407)

INT. THE OCCIDENTAL -- NIGHT

Me: You know, this'll obviously not work out long term.
Her: ... Why?
Me: Well, your first name's Nikki.

<She stares at me.>

Me: If we got married, you'd be Nikki Hickey.
Her: Why did you even bother ringing me up then?

<Mockery of date continues for another 32 minutes.>

Filed in: personal

Where am I?

OK, I admit it. I haven't been blogging lately.

This week I got a job at the Ministry of Women's Affairs (starts on Monday) and I'm now looking for a flat with as much of the rest of my time as I can spare.

And just a few minutes ago, my speech recognition software started going hay-wire. According to Brewer's, 'haywire' is an American phrase probably arising "from the difficulty of handling the coils of wire used for binding bundles of hay, which easily became entagled and unmanageable is handled unskilfully." That's a concept that lacks application to my day-to-day life. Might be time to look for a new turn-of-phrase.

Online, I've been enjoying reading Jane Espenson's blog - she has much fame from her writing credits on Buffy, Gilmore Girls and many other shows. 90% of her entries deal with the practicalities of writing for TV. The rest centre around what she had for lunch.

And on Kung Fu Monkey, John Rogers - co-writer of The Core, which I really enjoyed on Monday night (and see his defence of its scientific accuracy here) - is breaking down the process of being a freelancer and writing a episode for TV. The show in question is the still in development Eureka, about a small town composed entirely of super-geniuses.

More later, as I get the chance.

Filed in: personal script

Sad to go, Glad to be home

Back.
It was the best holiday ever.
Great for my family, great for me.

Highlights and a more detailed report should follow, but for now:
Shrek 4-D
Snorkelling above a coral reef
Asking Shiralee to dance after sneaking in to the VIP lounge of a wet-tshirt competition
The Wedding
Dad
The Obliteration Room
The Girl at Mind Games
Learning first hand about the good & bad of having a global culture
Seeing Wellington at night
Family.

Filed in: personal

See ya real soon!

I'm in Australia till the 16th for my sister's wedding.

There is much to blog about, but it'll have to wait.

The Limit - Done for now

Inquiry letters have been sent to producers. My awesome reader-volunteers have all hopefully received their copies of the script.

Now all I have to do is work on my website & get ready for Australia.

Oh, and as I said, I'll be looking for a flat when I get back (for around March 3). So if anyone knows anyone who's looking for a tidy, reliable, pretty quiet flatmate for the city or the inner suburbs ... well, that's me!

Filed in: Limit personal

Lost - something that bugs me

Re-watching the 'Destination Lost' special on Wednesday night gave me quite a surprise. There's something fundamental to the show - its soap opera character backgrounds - that bugs me.

Now I like Lost and what the writers are doing - but part of it's appeal is that it originally seemed to centre on ordinary people, trying to survive. The beginning of the special certainly reinforced this. These are normal airline passengers, it stated, who through extraordinary circumstances are forced to learn more about each other and rely on each other. I've said before that I think this was the basis of Lost's initial appeal. Its universality; it's "what would I do in that situation?"

However, where that theory breaks down is that the main characters are a paraplegic mystic, a possibly psychic child, a drug addict from a famous rock band and a wanted criminal. And all of them seemed to be bound together by forces of fate or science that are greater than themselves.

Yes, this is good series design - it gives you lots of nice personal stories to play out over the island & (again) lets you contrast to people were before and after the crash. But it's certainly not 'universal'.

And I believe a good show could be made out of characters who are just ordinary people, possessing no particular soap opera conflicts to begin with - and the drama would come simply from watching them react sensibly to incredibly difficult situations. In fact, our brainstorming group is working just such a show at the moment.

*I think this is something that Chris pointed out to me many months ago, but I've only just noticed it for myself.

Filed in: lost tv script howto

The Limit - Home Stretch

The draft is coming into the home stretch. Less than 20 pages to go. Decisions are easier to make now. Dialogue is coming to me like I’m overhearing the conversations from a distance.

After this, a short break to organise stuff for my sister’s wedding and the flat, then a sweep through the script to tidy up descriptions and format dialogue.

One mechanical thing I found useful on this draft was to put the script feedback into ‘endnote’ format, so that all the potential edits are together on one page. I put each Endnote under the Scene Heading, so it’s very clear what needs to be worked on.

Contacted readers yesterday. Good response so far. Also started working on letters to producers. Very excited.

Filed in: script limit personal

Looking for a flat - while writing

I’ve said it before: I always take a long time to ramp up to full-writing-speed when I start a new draft. One of the causes (I’ve just discovered) is that it takes me a while to regain the confidence to make rapid decisions about the writing – as I start getting back into it, I’d prefer to fluff around paralysed by the choices I could be making rather than commit to something & lock it down.

**

I enjoyed Brainlord last Wednesday. We started developing a TV series set in (if I have my history right) pre-colonial NZ. Its working title is Hellhole – and it’s all about the demythologising.

**

More stuff is happening, but I’ve got to get back to the writing now. However, I will be looking for a flat when I get back from Australia in mid-Feb … so, it’s going to be a busy next couple of months.

Filed in: script personal

Dirty Virgins and restarting the script

I playtested Dirty Virgins on Tuesday night (due to a couple of players not showing up for Buffy & me forgetting the most vital ingredient for the game ... Tequila! ... ah, I mean character sheets). I've posted about the DV experience here, at the Forge, but the short version is: the fun of the game was in narrating all the dirty stuff the virgins were doing, while the voting didn't seem to work. At all.

Them's that played the game with me, feel free to comment here or there about the night.

In other news, I've been cruising on a post-Kapcon buzz for about 4 days, checking out lots of blogs and posting muchly. That has to stop now. I've got to focus on this next draft of The Limit (for at least the next week).

Filed in: rpg script

If you played Lucky Jones ...

If you played Lucky Jones over the weekend, I have started a thread at the Forge. It'd be great if you could contribute your thoughts ... particularly whether you found keeping track of your Bonuses/Penalties/Rerolls to be a pain or not.

The thread is here. Alternatively, just comment here.

Filed in: rpg

Kapcon 2

Inspectres. I won’t try to summarise the madness. Let’s just say that final mission, from The City to the Lightning-King’s Castle … and finally coming to rest on a beach in Mexico,was my favourite game of InSpectres ever. It’s also inspired me with two thoughts:

1) Play a hard core, grim in tone series of missions.
2) Our Tuesday night group should play three or four or five game-nights in a row of our ongoing Inspectres Wellington game. Let’s see what this puppy can do.

Then it was time to wrap up and hang out with Gino while we looked at all the amazing costumes. I thought Debz’ dress was awesome, while the Invisible Man seemed like the biggest crowd pleaser. I also regreat not seeing Nick Pitt in his Puck-horns.

I thought might get a good night sleep by not going to the LARP, and but instead Helen and Sean came round and we had a great time hanging out, drinking wine. I decided to get up early and do my prep – but it all went horribly wrong & I ended up having to sprint to the convention in order to make it to the morning presentations.

The second session of Lucky Jones turned into American Pie-meets-24. We had sleazy sex comedy coupled with an increasingly serious work situation that eventually involved the FBI and terrorists. We only got through one episode that session - and it was during those 3 hours that I finally started to get some understanding of what was and wasn't working with my game.

Things that surprised me:

- Lucky Jones is so much about the ephemeral moments of comedy. The system seems to encourage players to make jokes, introduce zany characters or one-liners & then to move on.

- There is an intuitive continuity to episodes - even while timelines were being stretched hard, they never broke. For instance, one player had a plot set over one night while another player's plot spanned a couple of weeks. Through judicious flashbacks and weavings, everything seemed to make sense. In fact, when things got quite tricky to connect, the whole table got together and collaborated to figure out a way to make it work.

- There was a fantastic moment when someone broke the PG-rating we were (implicitly) creating, another person yelled "Cut!", there was a little bit of discussion as if we were on the set of the sitcom while it was being shot and then I yelled "Take 2 " and we were back in the game.

- Even though the rules were a bit broken, I'm now convinced there's a really fun game in here.

There's an AP thread about it at the Forge.

In terms of rewrites, I found the second session extremely valuable. During that first game, I was just trying to wrap my head around presenting the rules and then watching it play. In the second session I was able to step back & ask myself questions about what was working or not. In fact, about halfway through that session, gameplay kind of disintegrated for a while as we actually analysed the process & pacing that Lucky Jones was creating.

Biggest discoveries:

The game takes too long to play. Ideally, I'd like there to be two episodes in a session with the first episode coming in somewhere between 45 to 90 minutes. Right now it's more like two to three hours. Restructuring the way you swap between tracks should go a long way to fixing that.

However, I have also discovered that there could be a long-term reward cycle (in the form of Penalties) operating in the game. Penalties are earned by failing to get what you want by the end of an episode. If I adjust how Penalties are used, so that you can either use it on yourself (giving yourself a slight disadvantage) or pass it to another person (giving yourself a slight advantage), then I think this will create a Fruitful Void.

That's the first time I've ever been able to sense what a Fruitful Void would feel like, so I'm quite excited! Basically, I think that being able to trade Penalties between players will force them to ask the implicit question "What sort of family are we?" Are they a group of individuals who'll crap on the people around them for some medium-term gain or will they suck it in and make sacrifices for each other?

I like that.

… Next Post: Universalis, a conversation with Morgue and Mike, prizegiving.

Filed in: rpg

RPG - My Big Weekend

Kapcon.

Over two days, I ran 12 hours worth of games (and played for another 3) and in every single one of them, there were hour-long stretches where I was just rapt at the stories emerging – unpredictable, intense. My goal for this year was to get the most player input I could in my sessions & I totally achieved it. Mostly that input came as a result of the games I selected, but also it was because I focused over and over again on being a facilitator (except in Universalis).

Big lesson from this bout of gaming is ‘never be afraid to increase the adversity’. My game, Lucky Jones, is entirely designed around that principle – but seeing it play out in Inspectres and – especially – in Universalis … and OMG, that Universalis game should live in freaking legend.

Adversity forces people to be creative, it makes them stand up for what they really want, to say what they value and what’s worth fighting for … and adversity makes you feel like you’ve earned survival or success or – in the case of one AWESOME Lucky Jones subplot – the respect of your family.

I’m not talking about being a jerk; introducing adversity is not about rough-riding over the other players. I’m talking about everyone being totally upfront, saying this is “what I want to do to your character and why” and asking whether you’re up for it.

Plus, adversity creates a situation. Stories need conflict; focusing on the right conflict at the right time creates a throughline for your story. See this colourful diagram for a better explanation. Plus, all the systems I ran can totally handle adversity: in Lucky Jones, you can’t die you can only fail (plus in the next draft, those failures will give you cool goodies), InSpectres allows you to narrate your way out of anything & Universalis thrives on conflict – as one player (I think it was Jonathan) said, because you don’t have a character of your own, you feel fine about screwing yourself over.

And, yeah, I had some adversity of my own at Kapcon.

I couldn’t believe how nervous I was on Saturday. Totally nervous. First con game ever, for people I mostly don’t know & it’s my own untested re-edited game design as well. But Lucky Jones went done well. I pulled in Giffy as an extra player at the last minute & so got to sit outside the game a little bit and observe (while still taking my turn as the Cast Member).

Oh, basic explanation. Each game of Lucky Jones = an episode of a sitcom. In any given scene, one player’s the star of the show while everyone else hurts and helps them.

I describe that first game as Family Guy meets American Beauty. What I loved about the game was a) Giffy’s adorable portrayal of River Jones, Andrew’s succession of sly patriarchal bastards (and doomed attempts to escape his family), Uncle Ivan, the ultimate fate of the remote controlled car … just a succession of inspired moments and characters whose sole goal was to add to the lunacy. I think the system really inspires people to contribute that sort of ephemeral comedy & b) …

Well, we played 2 episodes and the amount of reincorporation and character development was just incredible. Favourite characters from the previous ep reappearing, Wants being developed & (in Giffy’s case) Wants staying the same – which lead to the development of the insane trash-talking forbidden tree in the backyard.

Inspectres, Lucky Jones 2, that session of Universalis & a sweet sweet game of Badass Space Marines followed. You can find Mike’s write-up of the BSM game here.

But I have to say: so impressed by the quality of the players who sat down at the table with me & their willingness to throw themselves into the game. In all 4 sessions – like I said at the top – I was riveted. I was running games where I could actually leave the room (for water, toilet breaks, etc) and the story would continue … and not only was I always reluctant to leave cos’ I wanted to see what’d happen next, but I’d then rush back in and breathlessly ask what I’d missed.

That’s some serious story.

Filed in: rpg

Filed in: rpg script